Sylvia Plath

"Is anyone anywhere happy?"

"LADY LAZARUSI have done it again. One year in every ten I manage it--A sort of walking miracle, my skin Bright as a Nazi lampshade,My right foot A paperweight,My face a featureless, fine Jew linen. Peel off the napkin O my enemy. Do I terrify?--The nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth?The sour breath Will vanish in a day. Soon, soon the flesh The grave cave ate will be At home on me And I a smiling woman. I am only thirty. And like the cat I have nine times to die. This is Number Three. What a trash To annihilate each decade. What a million filaments. The peanut-crunching crowd Shoves in to see Them unwrap me hand and foot--The big strip tease. Gentlemen, ladies These are my hands My knees. I may be skin and bone,Nevertheless, I am the same, identical woman. The first time it happened I was ten. It was an accident. The second time I meant To last it out and not come back at all. I rocked shut As a seashell. They had to call and call And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls. Dying Is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well. I do it so it feels like hell. I do it so it feels real. I guess you could say I've a call. It's easy enough to do it in a cell. It's easy enough to do it and stay put. It's the theatrical Comeback in broad day To the same place, the same face, the same brute Amused shout:'A miracle!'That knocks me out. There is a charge For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge For the hearing of my heart--It really goes. And there is a charge, a very large charge For a word or a touch Or a bit of blood Or a piece of my hair or my clothes. So, so, Herr Doktor. So, Herr Enemy. I am your opus,I am your valuable,The pure gold baby That melts to a shriek. I turn and burn. Do not think I underestimate your great concern. Ash, ash--You poke and stir. Flesh, bone, there is nothing there--A cake of soap, A wedding ring,A gold filling. Herr God, Herr Lucifer Beware Beware. Out of the ash I rise with my red hair And I eat men like air.-- written 23-29 October 1962"

"The thought that I might kill myself formed in my mind coolly as a tree or a flower."

"I am terrified by this dark thing That sleeps in me;All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity."

"I?I walk alone;The midnight street Spins itself from under my feet;My eyes shut These dreaming houses all snuff out;Through a whim of mine Over gables the moon's celestial onion Hangs high."

"I lean to you, numb as a fossil. Tell me I'm here."

"I told him I believed in hell, and that certain people, like me, had to live in hell before they died, to make up for missing out on it after death, since they didn't believe in life after death, and what each person believed happened to him when he died."

"Dying Is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well. I do it so it feels like hell. I do it so it feels real. I guess you could say I have a call."

"I need a father. I need a mother. I need some older, wiser being to cry to. I talk to God, but the sky is empty."

"There is nothing like puking with somebody to make you into old friends."

"Writing, then, was a substitute for myself: if you don't love me, love my writing & love me for my writing. It is also much more: a way of ordering and reordering the chaos of experience."

"I wonder why I don't go to bed and go to sleep. But then it would be tomorrow, so I decide that no matter how tired, no matter how incoherent I am, I can skip on hour more of sleep and live."

"I want to write because I have the urge to excel in one medium of translation and expression of life. I can't be satisfied with the colossal job of merely living. Oh, no, I must order life in sonnets and sestinas and provide a verbal reflector for my 60-watt lighted head."

"I wanted to crawl in between those black lines of print, the way you crawl through a fence, and go to sleep under that beautiful big green fig-tree."

"Living with him is like being told a perpetual story: his mind is the biggest, most imaginative I have ever met. I could live in its growing countries forever."

"Remember, remember, this is now, and now, and now. Live it, feel it, cling to it. I want to become acutely aware of all I’ve taken for granted."

"What I fear most, I think, is the death of the imagination. When the sky outside is merely pink, and the rooftops merely black: that photographic mind which paradoxically tells the truth, but the worthless truth, about the world. It is that synthesizing spirit, that shaping force, which prolifically sprouts and makes up its own worlds with more inventiveness than God which I desire. If I sit still and don't do anything, the world goes on beating like a slack drum, without meaning. We must be moving, working, making dreams to run toward; the poverty of life without dreams is too horrible to imagine."

"So, now I shall talk every night. To myself. To the moon. I shall walk, as I did tonight, jealous of my loneliness, in the blue-silver of the cold moon, shining brilliantly on the drifts of fresh-fallen snow, with the myriad sparkles. I talk to myself and look at the dark trees, blessedly neutral. So much easier than facing people, than having to look happy, invulnerable, clever. With masks down, I walk, talking to the moon, to the neutral impersonal force that does not hear, but merely accepts my being. And does not smite me down."

"You will never win anyone through pity. You must create the right kind of dream, the sober, adult kind of magic: illusion born from disillusion."

"The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt."